Evolved Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) Terrestrial Radio Access Network (e-UTRAN or EUTRAN) is an air interface of The Third Generation Partnership (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) upgrade path for mobile communications systems. e-UTRAN is also known as Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) in early drafts of 3GPP LTE. 3GPP LTE Release-10 introduces to the standard several LTE Advanced (LTE-A) features like carrier aggregation, uplink (UL) Single User Multiple Input Multiple Output (SU-MIMO), relay nodes, and the like, aiming to provide a considerable peak data rate increase.
A downlink (DL), which is a unidirectional communications link from a communications controller (commonly referred to as a base station, a NodeB, an enhanced NodeB, a controller, a cell, a macro cell a low power cell, and the like) to a communications device (such as a relay node, or a mobile station, also commonly referred to as a User Equipment, user, subscriber, terminal, and the like), includes several control channels. The control channels include a Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH) that carries, among other information, the DL allocation information and UL allocation grants for the communications device. While the Physical Control Format Indicator Channel (PCFICH) is used to signal the length of the PDCCH. The Physical Hybrid ARQ Indicator Channel (PHICH) used to carry the acknowledgments from the uplink transmissions. The Physical Downlink Shared Channel (PDSCH) is used for L1 transport data transmission. Supported modulation formats on the PDSCH are QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM. The Physical Multicast Channel (PMCH) is used for broadcast transmission using a Single Frequency Network. The Physical Broadcast Channel (PBCH) is used to broadcast the basic system information within the cell.